


When Spoken To

by TK_DuVeraun



Category: Diablo III
Genre: Discussion of Death, F/M, No Need For Words, family life for nephalem, grim dark, necromancers doing necromancer things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-04 09:13:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18340634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TK_DuVeraun/pseuds/TK_DuVeraun
Summary: You would have to be zealous or stupid to believe the Templar Order's lies. Amos does not mind the facade - whatever life he had before was not a kind one.It is only when he meets one of Rathma's chosen at the site of the Fallen Star that he wonders if what came before matters.





	1. Scars

**Author's Note:**

> A collection of ficlets in the same D3 AU 'verse! The chapters are posted more or less in chronological order, but the styles vary wildly.

His earliest memory was scars. All over his hands and arms. A few on his chest, many on his back. The room was little more than a cell - and referred to as such - and he spent at least an hour trying to make sense of the dark, twisted skin on his back. Whatever had come before that moment was ugly.

_He_  was ugly.

But it hardly mattered, did it? There in that little cell with old, but polished armor. A new gambeson and skin that torn and callused, but not from the armor. The bed was made, he remembered, with the holy book settled in the center. He didn’t try the door - doubtless it was locked, so he read.

The book was ugly, too.

* * *

Each of his scars, Amos was told, had an explanation. A history,  _his_  history, of crime. He didn’t believe it, though the others seemed to. He didn’t know his past, but Amos knew his  _mind_  and he was too smart, too clever to have so many mistakes carved into his skin. He didn’t comment on it. This Templar Order was full of liars, yes, but they were teaching him to defend himself, giving him the tools to prevent more ugliness.

When his body was broken and tired, they taught him the history of Sanctuary - of the Eternal Conflict that still raged, of angels and demons and how the Order was formed to combat them. It was all rather fanciful, rehabilitating criminals to fight on behalf of the mortals they’d wrong in their past life.

As ugly as he was with his scars and monstrous size and mismatched eyes, Amos knew his mind was not so ugly as they tried to tell him. Not now and certainly not before he lost his memories, whatever ugliness they had.

But he was silent, for cooperation and compliance would get him what questions and sedition would not.

* * *

Jondar questioned too frequently and too loudly. Amos agreed with him, knew the Order spoke nothing but lies in their ears, but he accepted the roof over his head and the food on his plate. He was glad when Jondar was wise enough to leave before he was silenced.

Less so when Kormac was sent after him.

Amos was agreeable, skilled and, above all, quiet. The preceptors hadn’t hesitated to agree to his request to join Kormac. Kormac wasn’t one for books or journaling. Amos would take whatever texts and notes Jondar had and keep them to himself, of that, the Order was sure.

* * *

Kormac had an itch under his skin that made him talk. At first, Amos wondered why such a poor operative had been sent after Jondar, but the answer was clear in time. Despite the lies they’d both been told, Kormac was not particularly quick to believe in redemption. Or rather, a thief could redeem himself fine without his right hand.

Amos watched the affair in silence and pity. The ‘thief’ was thin, desperate around the eyes and in clothes more patches that whole cloth. There were fresh stains on his shoulders, white, hastily smudged away. He  _smelled_  of sweat and milk, but to Kormac he was an ugly thief, not a new father with a starving family. He escorted the man away from their camp himself. Kormac had smirked at him, thinking he’d teach the man a further lesson.

He did.

That kindness could still exist in the cesspit his life had become. 

Kormac was poorly with numbers, he didn’t realize they couldn’t have possibly spent all of their coin so quickly. He accepted Amos’ request for more without question. Amos’ lesson would not feed the man and his family long. Just enough for the cauterized stump to heal, hopefully long enough for them to think of a plan.

Amos didn’t waste his ugly heart on hoping the family would live happily ever after. Such beauty existed only in storybooks.

He had believed in nothing so much as that.

* * *

Cassandra Hyal was not the first Priest of Rathma Amos had ever seen. The man had been barely a man and barely grey of hair, but with eyes that had seen more death than a man that earned his white hair from age. The bones on his armor had been coarse, stout and strong as strong. Calcified. Amos knew the word, but not from where.

Hyal’s were like gems, gaudy ornamentation to show all who and what she was at a glance, if her white hair and commanding presence weren’t enough. She was the true star fallen from the heavens, not Cain’s mysterious stranger.

She looked into his eyes and asked, “What do you see in this, Amos?”

She’d called him Ser Kormac. She referred to Faust Sa’alle as Lord Wizard.

With one look, six words and his name, she’d proven she knew him better than any else would.

_The most beautiful of things in this ugly existence_ , he thought as he looked to her. Not up at, not down to. Never.

“I believe this Fallen Star is only the beginning.”


	2. True Sleep

One night in Caldeum, he enters Cassandra’s room and waits for her to notice him from her meditation.

“You need sleep. Real sleep.”

Their lock eyes in challenge and question; finally, she nods. “I will sleep tonight.” She moves to remove her armor, so he leaves her room, but he stays at the door. 

He knows it’s not out of paranoia that she meditates, but he will watch for her regardless. Except her door opens. 

“I’ll not have you stand vigil over me to ensure I sleep." 

He can’t argue with that. Never really can, with her, rare as it is that he wants to. Amos lets himself be herded into his room, tries to forget he ever saw how soft how vulnerable she looks in a nightgown. But he can’t close his door behind him. She’s there, pushing her way in and closing it behind herself. 

There’s no hesitation in her voice. "You can keep your concern.”  She nods at his bed, but it’s an order, not an invitation.  

He follows it, in too much shock to give voice to the gasp as she fits in next to him. There’s hardly space for him alone; she curls half on top of him. She’s asleep in moments, before he can truly grasp what’s happened. 

He puts his arm around her back, so she doesn’t roll off him and onto the floor, moves her braid out from under her so it doesn’t catch should she turn in her sleep. He’s certain he can lay still for eternity with her, but somehow he sleeps. 


	3. Bones

Cassandra Hyal was a Priest of Rathma. She wore it in the bones on her armor and the whiteness of her hair. Her body was young, but not her eyes or her heart. Amos never asked if it was her past or the whispers of the dead and dying that sapped expression from her. Her cousin, the silly red-haired wizard with more power than sense, called her emotionless. He was wrong.

She did not care for matters of life and death - life was death, after all, but that did not make her without feeling. It did not erase the way she turned her face to the sun over Caldeum or how she filled her bag with bright blossoms from the oasis. She spoke, even and quiet, to children, teaching them lessons about the world while they sat in awe of her appearance. Were she without feeling, she would have ignored the children and their stares. Were she without feeling, she wouldn’t have stabbed her cousin for commenting on her height.

Cassandra healed the wound. In a way. She waited for him to bleed out, which did not take long with her precision, and then brought him back from Death. She confided to Amos that it didn’t always count to revive those she had killed herself.

He didn’t know enough about the Cycle and the beliefs of Rathma to disagree, but he did believe it was a personal fancy rather than a teaching.

Amos never met another Priest of Rathma. The Order’s texts described them as wearing full plate armor made of bone, but Cassandra wore only thin, green leather. The bones were ornamentation, not protection and he wondered at, not worried for, her in the depths of Leoric’s dungeons. At first, she moved too quickly to be struck, much like the bickering demon hunters. The hordes of undead did not allow that strategy long. She waded in at Amos’ side, then swept her hand out and around her body.

Cracks like hail on clay tiles rang out and nearly deafened their party. The skeletons exploded into shards of bone that whirled around her like a dust devil. How they missed her arms and scythe when she struck out, he didn’t know nor have time to wonder on. The air was thick with a green smoke she called “Essence” when she fought. It brushed against her cheek like a lover when she dismissed it in safety and she nodded her head to it with closed eyes when it left.

Cassandra Hyal was not without emotion, but the others did not believe it until they saw for themselves.

At the very pinnacle of Heaven, the Prime Evil itself locked her in a cage of bone. She collapsed, limp with sightless eyes, and Amos feared her dead. He held her, as disjointed as a marionette cut from its strings, as the silly wizard cast spell after spell on the cage of bone. The Prime Evil was dead before them, but its creation they could not destroy? 

The woman demon hunter noticed the cause first, the one with a name as sharp as her blades. The bones on Cassandra’s armor glowed with a hint of Essence that snaked around the cage’s bars. She wore latent spells to strengthen her whirlwind of protection. Spells so strong they worked even when her body did not.

One of the other demon hunters, the most crass one, if that were possible, stepped up to the cage then. He grunted, muttered and complained as he wove his hands through the air. “If she’d come off her pedestal long enough to teach me anything properly, this would be easier, but no, the selfish bitch didn’t and now I have to do this the hard way.”

Few humans - few nephalem - could manipulate Essence. The hunter had claimed the gift, but with his every aspect failing to measure up to Cassandra, Amos had not believed him. He was rarely so happy to be wrong. Her eyes fell shut once freed and he could breathe again.

She could not sleep in the Keep or a tent, so they laid atop the parapets, stained with blood and demonic ichor, for rest. And sleep she did, for meditation would not come to her. The others did not know what to say, though it didn’t stop them trying. They didn’t understand why being caged had affected her so. All but her cousin assumed it was a cruel twist of irony from being locked in bone. He made warming trinkets and spells for their nights open to the sky and for once in the journey said nothing.

When words returned to her, Cassandra took his hand and said only. “Let us find a home, Amos.”


	4. Cursed

Pilbridge was a town between Westmarch and Bramwell. The townsfolk didn’t quite believe the stories out of Westmarch: about angels and demons and spirits of death cutting people down in the streets. They accepted the ‘refugees’, but were happy when they went home after the ruckus. One man moved in properly, though.

His name was Amos. He was tall and broad and learned in a way that didn’t make sense with his scarred hands and strong muscles, but no one asked too many questions. Not of him, anyway. He brought with him his little, cursed wife. She was a small thing with white hair, bones on her jewelry and a belly huge and round with child. She didn’t leave their house, which the townsfolk were more than happy with. Her cold expression and voice unsettled the adults and frightened the children. She refused the midwife when her time came and everyone was sure she’d birthed a demon.

In those first months, no one saw the little, cursed wife. Amos spent time in town, writing letters for people, fixing furniture and hunting the wolves that harassed the livestock. Eventually, he brought his new son with him. Gavriil had dark hair and two of his father’s blue eye. He was a quiet baby and smiled at everyone once he could. 

When he was a toddler, spending all day running around in the sun, Gavriil’s hair lightened to show the red undertones. He was no longer quiet, saying every word he knew and plenty he didn’t. Pilbridge was charmed. If he seemed to take a long time to grow up, no one minded. He was sweet and if he was tiny, well, his mother had been that cursed woman and no one had seen her for years.

Actually, one day Amos came into the town center with a short, red-haired woman. No one said anything, but everyone was delighted that he’d finally found a proper mother for Gav. She was a mage, but quiet about it. The only oddness in her was the little bird skeleton she enchanted as a toy for Gav. It was strange, but no stranger than how slowly he seemed to grow up. He was buying his own bread from the baker when Christine was born, but he’d only just developed an interest in romance when she became an adult herself. 

She was charmed by the tiny bird skeleton that hopped and danced, even if she found Gav’s mother to be strange and detached. Maybe she was nobility ousted in the Westmarch rebellion - that would explain how particular she was about things and how her skin looked as if it’d never seen the sun. 

Christine was just discussing with her parents what they could offer as a dowry when the rotted wood supports in their house gave out. All of Pilbridge flooded the street at the crashing. Amos was tearing through the wreckage before the shock wore off even the closest neighbors. Gav nearly carried his mother to the destroyed house in his desperate haste. She could heal some, as a mage, perhaps, but the light in Christine’s eyes went out just as Amos sets her in the street.

Gav sobbed, pleaded, begged for forgiveness, but not from his love, no, from his mother. It was strange, but grief was never simple. One of the townsfolk stepped forward, hand outstretched to offer condolences.

They froze in their steps when Gav’s mother started her magic anyway. It was cold, the magic. The ground was suddenly stiff with frost and the sky itself seemed to darken. Her red hair bleached at the roots as she lifted her arms and wisps of  _something_  swirled around her. She chanted in an arcane tongue and the wisps caressed Christine’s cold cheek like a lover before seeping into her body.

The dead girl startled with a gasp and a shiver.

Gav’s little bird skeleton always had acted ever so much like a live bird.

Amos’ little wife had never really been cursed.

Priests of Rathma were their own curses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, folks! I may revisit this AU at some point, it's a lot of fun!


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